Here and Now – Media Nation

Celebrating 25 years of Cambridge Community TV

Old friend Robin Young of WBUR and NPR’s “Here & Now” and I were named honorary board members of Cambridge Community Television on Wednesday evening. The occasion was CCTV’s annual barbecue, held in the back lot at the Central Square facility. There’s more here (pdf).

The highlight of the evening came when Susan Fleischmann was honored for her 25 years at the helm of CCTV, which itself was celebrating its 25th anniversary. Local access cable operations are a key part of the independent media ecosystem.

I don’t live in Cambridge, so I don’t get to see CCTV. But it strikes me as an unusually rich and sophisticated operation, with three channels, lots of local programming and training sessions for youth and adults.

Many thanks to the folks at CCTV for their hospitality and their good work.

Photo by Wilder Bunke.

Local public radio rivalry heats up

Best wishes to my old friend Robin Young and to Jeremy Hobson, whose revamped, two-hour “Here & Now” program debuted on Monday. Based at public radio station WBUR (90.9 FM), the program is national in scope, and is intended as a partial replacement for “Talk of the Nation,” which departed the airwaves last week.

Both “Here & Now” and “Boston Public Radio,” on rival WGBH (89.7 FM), are broadcast from noon to 2 p.m., setting up an intriguing dynamic: a nationally focused news magazine on ’BUR alongside local news and talk, hosted by Jim Braude and Margery Eagan, on ’GBH.

I hope and expect that both programs will succeed. (Disclosure: I’m a paid contributor to WGBH.)

Public radio’s new local focus

Good news for fans of quality local radio: WBUR (90.9 FM) is expanding its “Radio Boston” program from one day a week to five. Along with Emily Rooney‘s and Callie Crossley‘s new shows on WGBH (89.7 FM), that’s three hours a day of local programming on the city’s two largest public radio stations. Adam Gaffin has the news, and Adam Reilly has more.

WBUR’s other news and public-affairs programs, “On Point” and “Here and Now,” are excellent but lack a local focus, as they are both nationally syndicated. By going daily, “Radio Boston” plugs a hole at WBUR that was left in the 1990s, when Christopher Lydon‘s legendary program “The Connection” went national.

My disclaimer: I am a paid weekly panelist on “Beat the Press,” a WGBH-TV (Channel 2) program of which Rooney is the host and Crossley is a regular.